The last term and the “soul/with no leak at the seam”, “papers from drawers” have double meanings, to both her medical treatments and the process of writing. The “corridors of pale green and grey”, “to the priest, he’s the doctor/he can handle the shocks” and “wear your inside out” are all about her stays in mental hospitals, which included electroshock therapy. The title of one her last collections was The Awful Rowing Towards God and this is what Gabriel refers to, “let’s take the boat out” is an invitation to suicide, “wait until darkness” reminds us that things can always get worse. It’s also evident that she was having a love affair with death. As she grew older, she became more religious and that imagery became more frequent. She wrote about taboo subjects, which even now are sometimes startling, so I can imagine how shocking they must have been in the 60’s. She is usually classified as a confessional poet and it’s easy to see why.
Peter gabriel in your eyes lyrics meaning full#
Her work is very raw, with personal symbols and full of vibrant pain. I don’t really like Sexton’s poetry, that’s why I am approaching it through Peter Gabriel’s song instead. Hemingway committed suicide, but we mostly remember his macho activities big game hunting, running with the bulls. Sure, male writers kill themselves, but that’s not the main focus of their lives. Why do we remember so many women writers for their suicides? Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Sexton. From the song, I assumed she had drowned herself, and was surprised to learn that actually she put on her mother’s fur coat, took a glass of vodka and locked herself in her garage with the car motor running. So, at the age of 46, one autumn afternoon in 1974, she committed suicide. But increasingly, manic episodes and suicide attempts led to hospital stays which interrupted her writing and wreaked havok on her family. Her play Mercy Street premiered Off Broadway in 1969. Her career was going wonderfully, a Pulitzer Prize, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and numerous other awards, grants and fellowships, along with teaching gigs, including one at Oberlin College, here in Ohio. Nearly every year after that was a new book, including the four for children she wrote with lifelong friend and Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin.
She eloped with her husband at 20 and had two daughters soon after.Īccounts vary on when she began writing poetry, but her first collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back was published in 1960. It’s an excellent example of biography in song, mixing the person and the poet.Īnne Sexton was born in 1928 to a well to do family in Boston, Massachusetts where she went to private schools and briefly became a model in her late teens.
Peter gabriel in your eyes lyrics meaning movie#
It appeared on Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So, which was his most commercially successful, having such huge hits as Sledgehammer and In Your Eyes(the song from John Cusack’s movie “Say Anything”). This song was my introduction to Anne Sexton. “Mercy Street” as written by Peter Gabriel Pulling out the papers from drawers that slide smoothĬonfessing all the secret things in the warm velvet boxĭreaming of the tenderness, the tremble in the hips There in the midst of it so alive and alone Nowhere in the corridors of pale green and grey She pictures the broken glass, she pictures the steam
Looking down on empty streets, all she can see Anne Sexton in “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel
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